Aristotle and Wittgenstein

I’m afraid that some readers will be growing impatient as they read the foregoing discussion of a kind of Platonic resolution to the problem of rationality. Hadn’t I just, in the first half of this same chapter, argued for an operational theory of intentional predicates? Not only that, but when one suggests that the non-physical property of “meaning” can be washed out of the ontology of mind and language (replaced with an externalist account of intentional predicates as describing relations between persons and environments), that would be about as nominalist as one could go, surely? Maybe not. The Platonism that I am offering has only one element of basic ontology besides matter. Form is indivisible, not divisible; a unity, not a multiplicity. There is only one form really: only one (perhaps inexplicable) ontological fact beyond the fact of the existence of something rather than nothing. Putting the question of Plato and Aristotle’s own views of species as “fixed natural kinds” to the side in favor of a view of species informed by evolutionary biology, it can be seen that putative “forms” such as the property of “cowness” or “lyrehood” are not genuine examples of form. Some categories (types of species, types of artifacts) come-to-be and pass away. In its Aristotelian version Platonic form-matter dualism becomes a kind of non-reductive materialism: primary being is substance, the unity of form and matter. From the doctrine of the unity of form, though, it appears that this must be a kind of “non-reductive formalism” as well, as every particular with a formal property has that property, not by virtue only of the formally-organized parts of that particular, but by virtue of the entire formal organization of the material world: all geometric shapes (for example) are tokens of the one thing. We know that by this point Wittgenstein would be fuming, but as usual with him we might not be certain exactly why. Of course Wittgenstein would have none of this Platonic talk. “The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, ‘what is knowledge?’ he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.” (Blue and Brown Books; italics in original). Wittgenstein’s operationalist account of functional-role semantics is an arch-nominalist position: there is human behavior, a highly-adaptive and plastic process that changes over time, whose constants are determined by the biological (probably the best choice) nature of the human body and the human “mode of life.” “Property” names (like all names) really pick out parts of language, and the criteria for the proper application of language are essentially operational. Insofar as this line is developed as a strategy to naturalize meaning I think it’s a good one. But I have never thought that philosophy of mathematics was a particularly strong point for empiricists, and that is troubling considering that Wittgenstein devoted a considerable portion of his writings to the development of an operationalist theory of mathematics. In any event I am unpersuaded by Wittgenstein’s view that extending the known proofs of mathematics is nothing more than an elaboration of a kind of “language game,” specific to humans by virtue of our particular “form of life,” such that there was no such system of entailments until some human (for example) elaborated it. It’s counterintuitive: isn’t the fact, that we can work our way from one part of mathematics to another, evidence that mathematical reasoning is coherent? Doesn’t Wittgenstein’s ultra-nominalist view of mathematics overstate the possibility space: the different ways “mathematics” could go? However, it may be that the two treatments of the two different parts of intentionality - an eliminativist, operationalist argument to the effect that mental representation/content is not part of the reference of intentional predicates, on the one hand, and an Aristotelean argument to the effect that rationality is nothing more nor less than a formal property and that formal properties, if they exist at all, are ubiquitous – are compatible. According to Wittgenstein there are no abstract entities, of course, but it is important to appreciate how far Wittgenstein went in his naturalization of meaning, and how central to this were his ideas about mathematics. Wittgenstein saw mathematical behavior as a “technique,” a technique for living. “Living” is the operational verb that replaces the Cartesian verb “knowing”: a case of knowing how rather than knowing that. Wittgenstein rejected the passivity of the representational theory and insisted on viewing language as a physical behavior that aimed at getting on with the business of life. Granted that the Aristotelean world is one where every concrete particular is a union of matter and form, the “form of life,” understood as the vital activities of a being of that kind, would exhibit formal properties. In fact “behavioral ecology” develops an entire narrative, largely mathematical, about the ratio of nutrients per square meter to species population per square meter, showing the correlations between these functions and genetic transmission and so forth. The human “form of life,” if it is anything at all, is a product of the same natural history as that of the human organism; the rationality of humans, like the harmony of musical instruments, is an expression of form. Within this form of life, that stress made no more emphatically by anyone than Wittgenstein himself, the criteria for use of psychological predicates can be understood operationally such that no mental content is implied. In fact Wittgenstein and Aristotle come together in a sense around “form of life” or what Aristotle would call the telos of an organism. They both suspected that explanations about what sort of thing a thing was and what sort of life a thing led were more informative than explanations about what sort of things a thing thought. Wittgenstein thought that the notion of mental content made no sense. I take the argument from the form-matter distinction to show that “computation” need not necessarily entail mental representations; organizational complexity equivalent to the syntactical complexity of language is found throughout nature. Finally, Wittgenstein’s functional-role semantics and Aristotle’s teleological account of biological explanation are very similarly motivated. They come together in the area where functionalism replaces reductive materialism as a response to the supervenient nature of the functional property.

Wittgenstein and Aristotle?

I’m afraid that some readers will be growing impatient as they read the foregoing discussion of a kind of Platonic resolution to the problem of rationality. Hadn’t I just, in the first half of this same chapter, argued for an operational theory of intentional predicates? Not only that, but when one suggests that the non-physical property of “meaning” can be washed out of the ontology of mind and language (replaced with an externalist account of intentional predicates as describing relations between persons and environments), that would be about as nominalist as one could go, surely?

Maybe not. The Platonism that I am offering has only one element of basic ontology besides matter. Form is indivisible, not divisible; a unity, not a multiplicity. There is only one form really: only one (perhaps inexplicable) ontological fact beyond the fact of the existence of something rather than nothing. Putting the question of Plato and Aristotle’s own views of species as “fixed natural kinds” to the side in favor of a view of species informed by evolutionary biology, it can be seen that putative “forms” such as the property of “cowness” or “lyrehood” are not genuine examples of form. Some categories (types of species, types of artifacts) come-to-be and pass away.

In its Aristotelian version Platonic form-matter dualism becomes a kind of non-reductive materialism: primary being is substance, the unity of form and matter. From the doctrine of the unity of form, though, it appears that this must be a kind of “non-reductive formalism” as well, as every particular with a formal property has that property, not by virtue only of the formally-organized parts of that particular, but by virtue of the entire formal organization of the material world: all geometric shapes (for example) are tokens of the one thing.

We know that by this point Wittgenstein would be fuming, but as usual with him we might not be certain exactly why. Of course Wittgenstein would have none of this Platonic talk. “The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, ‘what is knowledge?’ he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.” (Blue and Brown Books; italics in original). Wittgenstein’s operationalist account of functional-role semantics is an arch-nominalist position: there is human behavior, a highly-adaptive and plastic process that changes over time, whose constants are determined by the biological (probably the best choice) nature of the human body and the human “mode of life.” “Property” names (like all names) really pick out parts of language, and the criteria for the proper application of language are essentially operational. Insofar as this line is developed as a strategy to naturalize meaning I think it’s a good one.

But I have never thought that philosophy of mathematics was a particularly strong point for empiricists, and that is troubling considering that Wittgenstein devoted a considerable portion of his writings to the development of an operationalist theory of mathematics. In any event I am unpersuaded by Wittgenstein’s view that extending the known proofs of mathematics is nothing more than an elaboration of a kind of “language game,” specific to humans by virtue of our particular “form of life,” such that there was no such system of entailments until some human (for example) elaborated it. It’s counterintuitive: isn’t the fact, that we can work our way from one part of mathematics to another, evidence that mathematical reasoning is coherent? Doesn’t Wittgenstein’s ultra-nominalist view of mathematics overstate the possibility space: the different ways “mathematics” could go?

However, it may be that the two treatments of the two different parts of intentionality - an eliminativist, operationalist argument to the effect that mental representation/content is not part of the reference of intentional predicates, on the one hand, and an Aristotelean argument to the effect that rationality is nothing more nor less than a formal property and that formal properties, if they exist at all, are ubiquitous – are compatible. According to Wittgenstein there are no abstract entities, of course, but it is important to appreciate how far Wittgenstein went in his naturalization of meaning, and how central to this were his ideas about mathematics. Wittgenstein saw mathematical behavior as a “technique,” a technique for living. “Living” is the operational verb that replaces the Cartesian verb “knowing”: a case of knowing how rather than knowing that. Wittgenstein rejected the passivity of the representational theory and insisted on viewing language as a physical behavior that aimed at getting on with the business of life.

Granted that the Aristotelean world is one where every concrete particular is a union of matter and form, the “form of life,” understood as the vital activities of a being of that kind, would exhibit formal properties. In fact “behavioral ecology” develops an entire narrative, largely mathematical, about the ratio of nutrients per square meter to species population per square meter, showing the correlations between these functions and genetic transmission and so forth. The human “form of life,” if it is anything at all, is a product of the same natural history as that of the human organism; the rationality of humans, like the harmony of musical instruments, is an expression of form.

Within this form of life, that stress made no more emphatically by anyone than Wittgenstein himself, the criteria for use of psychological predicates can be understood operationally such that no mental content is implied. In fact Wittgenstein and Aristotle come together in a sense around “form of life” or what Aristotle would call the telos of an organism. They both suspected that explanations about what sort of thing a thing was and what sort of life a thing led were more informative than explanations about what sort of things a thing thought. Wittgenstein thought that the notion of mental content made no sense. I take the argument from the form-matter distinction to show that “computation” need not necessarily entail mental representations; organizational complexity equivalent to the syntactical complexity of language is found throughout nature. Finally, Wittgenstein’s functional-role semantics and Aristotle’s teleological account of biological explanation are very similarly motivated. They come together in the area where functionalism replaces reductive materialism as a response to the supervenient nature of the functional property.

Plato and the Metaphysical Problem of Rationality

Plato, like Kant, was reacting to contemporary currents of thought that he regarded as dangerous. He took seriously an epistemological problem that he thought was posed by Heraclitus’ doctrine of universal flux (Plato disregards Heraclitus’ view that “all things happen in accord with the divine Logos” and sets Heraclitus up as the materialist foil to Parmenides). In a world where nothing was eternal, unchanging and universal, knowledge with those qualities was also not possible: it had no object. To try to compose a description of an ever-fluxing world was like “shooting after flying game” (as Socrates says in the Theatetus). That sort of knowledge was a snapshot of a mere moment, quickly passed. Plato’s strategy for addressing this epistemological problem was metaphysical: identify the eternal, unchanging and universal object.

Plato also opposed the reductive materialism of Anaxagoras and the other Melisians, early natural scientists (Aristotle, who shared Plato’s opposition to reductive materialism, addresses Democritus’ atomism). The word “reductive” in the phrase “reductive materialism” is also epistemological in its import: the idea is that macro-level phenomena (such as the minds of persons) will ultimately be explained in terms of micro-level phenomena (such as the parts of bodies). Materialism understood this way is committed to the view that properties are caused by matter. The materialist answer to the question “Why is this property what it is?” is “Because the underlying matter is what it is.” Both Plato and Aristotle argued that causation (and thus explanation) ran the other way.

Plato and Aristotle hold respective versions of the form-matter distinction, the view that basic ontology includes both form and matter. Plato’s version is patently dualist. He holds that form is primary being, that it is mind- and matter-independent, and that formal being acts on material being such that matter can only be said to be something to the degree that it is involved in form. Aristotle, objecting to what he saw as Plato’s ontological promiscuity, argued that substance, a union of matter and form, was primary being. Among other advantages this resolved the interaction problem that afflicts Plato’s dualism. On the other hand, the price of collapsing matter and form together into substance in this axiomatic way was that one had to accept that primary being was heterogeneous. This is counter-intuitive, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Close attention to Aristotle’s metaphysical differences with Plato is rewarded with any number of insights into subtleties of the mind-body problem (for example notice the resonance with Spinoza). We will return to Aristotle and De Anima, his own great work on the philosophy of mind, in Chapter Four.

However I will argue that these differences, significant as they are, are not relevant to the present, relatively broad point I want to make about the form-matter distinction, materialism, and the problem of rationality. Ultimately I’m more of an Aristotelian than a Platonist, but I think Plato’s more explicitly dualist discussion makes this broad point best so I will discuss two passages from Plato, the “analogy of the sun” at Republic 507b-509c and the treatment of the materialist argument that “soul is an attunement of the body” at Phaedo 93a-94e.

The Sun, Plato says, makes the universe a visible place. Our eyes take advantage of this (Plato and Aristotle resisted Empedocles’ arguments for natural selection, which they saw as reductive, but the reader should join me in helping ourselves to evolutionary biology wherever it helps to fill things in here). We can see each individual visible thing because the whole universe is suffused with that one element, light, which emanates from the Sun. Analogously Plato claimed that something he called “the Good” suffused the universe with order and made it an intelligible place. The Sun is to vision as the Good is to rationality: both vision and rationality are possible because of the existence of a more general feature of the universe. Plato takes the analogy farther. The Sun’s light is necessary for the growth of plants and the Good’s order is necessary for the emergence of definite (definable, intelligible) things. The Sun is the source of warmth; the Good is the source of value. Darkness is the absence of light; badness is the absence of order.

Describe any concrete particular thing. You will describe it (you can only describe it) in terms of its properties. Concrete particulars, as Heraclitus pointed out, are constantly coming-to-be and passing away. Properties (forms, universals) are eternal. The epistemological challenge posed by Heraclitus’ doctrine of universal flux is met with the Platonic doctrine that formal knowledge (knowledge of formal properties), as distinct from material knowledge (knowledge of concrete particulars), constitutes true understanding.

However there are properties and then there are properties. I stated at the beginning of the book that I don’t like a lot of loose talk about “properties” and that ultimately I think that physical properties are the only kind of properties that there are. If I am going to qualify that at all (and at the end of this discussion you will be left with your own judgment to decide how far I have gone in that direction, and if too far), then I had better try to be a good deal more precise about what I mean by “formal properties.”

Consider two putative properties: the property of “cowness” (or “being-a-cow” or what you will) and the property of circularity. According to Plato, as matter approaches nearer to form it comes to be something, “being” meaning “being intelligible,” which to Plato is a legitimate ontological category (Plato posits degrees of being, contrary to the materialist’s zero-sum understanding of being). However, while there are certainly well-formed cows and malformed cows, even a cow still-born with deformity is a cow (if someone comes into the barn and asks, “What is that?” the right answer is “That’s a cow.”). Plato and Aristotle thought that species were fixed natural kinds (to use the standard phrase), but we (well, I) don’t think so: species are the kinds of things that come-to-be and pass away, just as individuals do. With circularity the situation is different. Being a circle just is having (instantiating) that property, and there is a threshold of trueness short of which we will say that the concrete particular isn’t a circle in a sense that it cannot be said, of any animal born of cows, that it “isn’t a cow.” Once a cow, always a cow, but a concrete particular can gain and lose the property of circularity.

The extension of the set of all formal properties can only be understood in the context of Plato’s central metaphysical thesis of the Good. Plato is clear on the difference between material being and formal being. Material being is divisible (Socrates’ body can be chopped up into pieces and scattered like leaves or burnt and blown away like smoke), it is a multiplicity (I am one body, you are another), and it comes-to-be and passes away (“All men are mortal, Socrates is a man…”). What part of reality is indivisible, a unity (oneness), and eternal?

Imagine (if this is the sort of thing that can be imagined) that one’s sole mathematical practice was to name one set, {x,x}, let’s call it “2.” Now we reflect on our named set and it occurs to us that we need a name for the constituent set, {x}, so we call it something: “1.” It is now impossible not to notice a pair of functions, “+” and “=.” From these we will inevitably get to the other functions, and we also now have a practice of naming all sets; we have the set of natural numbers. In fact all of mathematics is entailed by any part of mathematics. Mathematics cannot be cut into pieces. To have it is to have, at least implicitly, all of it, including all of those proofs that no human has as yet discovered (it is mind-independent). Nor can any part of mathematics be considered, as physical objects can, in isolation from the rest. I can imagine a universe consisting only of this desk chair floating in the vast emptiness of space (I think), but if the proof of the infinity of prime numbers is floating out there, so is all the rest of mathematics. It is one, not a multiplicity of separable propositions. Not only that, but it looks like it is floating out there, since we discover the entailments. And those proofs would be valid, undoubtedly, whether or not there was any matter and energy at all. Mathematics is indivisible, a unity and eternal.

At this point it is possible to be more specific about what a “formal property” is. I take formal properties to be mathematical properties, essentially. For what it’s worth, I even think that this may not be far from Plato’s actual theory, reflecting as it does the metaphysical influence of Pythagoras and Parmenides. To say that a thing has a formal property is to say that there is an aspect or part of that thing that can only be described in terms of mathematical or logical relationships that can be formalized without reference to the contingent physical properties of the thing. For example the property of circularity is a formal property. The set of circular things includes wooden things, clay things, bone things and metal things, but circularity is supervenient: its mathematical description is about the spatial relationship between one of its parts and another and this formalizable (mathematical) relationship does not “reduce” to any contingent properties of wood cells or clay particles etc. That is, “formal properties” are properties that can be formalized. All formal properties are supervenient on matter: there is no physical criterion that fixes the extension of the set of physical things that instantiate the property.

Another way of saying the same thing is to say that any physical object might potentially be involved in any formal property. Formal properties are universal (sometimes they are called “universals”). A critical point here is that strictly speaking there is only one formal property, that property that the universe has of being formally organized by the Good. To speak of a plurality of “forms” (“circularity,” “rationality”) is figurative. There is only one form in which all formally organized things participate; only its expression in matter is multifarious as for example in the various geometrical shapes. (In the next section I will discuss whether and how much this literalist Platonism can coexist with materialism in general and particularly with the Wittgenstein-influenced eliminativism about mental content that I sketched above.)

At Phaedo 93a-94e Socrates is responding to a kind of materialist theory suggested by Simmias. Simmias acknowledges that Socrates can raise difficulties for the identification of the soul with the body by pointing out apparently metaphysical differences between them (for example with the argument from “recollection,” which is Socrates’ term of art for innate knowledge), but Simmias argues that the soul might nonetheless be a kind of “attunement” of the body. This is an emergentist view: when all of the physical properties come together in the right way, a non-physical property emerges, not identical to but dependent on (caused by) the underlying physical properties. Emergentism is a creature of that murky area, populated by refugees and smugglers, where “non-reductive materialism” and “epistemological dualism” share a hopelessly porous border. People who wind up here wanted the goodness of materialism without the badness. Plato’s (dualist) response to the emergentist challenge provides the last link in my argument for a Platonic resolution (I don’t say “solution”) to the problem of rationality.

Consider a musical instrument and the harmonious sounds it makes. On Simmias’ view the harmonious sounds are caused by the particular physical properties of the instrument. Thus while it’s true that the harmony is not identical to the body of the instrument, it is also true that with the passing away of the instrument’s body there will be a simultaneous passing away of the harmony. Socrates responds that harmony is a formal property. That is, harmony itself is not more or less harmonic, any more than circularity is more or less circular. It is physical particulars that can gain or lose circularity, gain or lose harmony. One can get more or less harmonious, but once a lyre always a lyre. The harmony, then, is nothing particular to the lyre; the lyre may have a particular sound in some other aspect, but qua harmonious it participates in the same harmony as every other harmonious object. “Harmonious” is the type, and the extension of the set of physical tokens (musical instruments) cannot be fixed with physical criteria; harmony is formalized in musical notation.

In fact causation runs the other way. Instruments were developed (over a more or less long period of time involving trial and error) according to how well various materials, constructions, forms and so forth achieved harmony. Musical instruments come to be, and are caused to have the physical properties that they have, by virtue of the principles of harmonics. Music is a clear case where the formal property (of harmony) is the antecedent cause of the formation of a set of physical particulars (musical instruments) that exist because they participate in the property. If someone asks, “Why is the lyre shaped like that?” the right answer is, “Because that shape is harmonic.”

Here is the argument towards which I have been working: Consider the three properties circularity, harmony and rationality. They are all formal properties: they are all supervenient and they are all formalizable. The property of rationality is a very fancy formal property compared to circularity, to be sure. But rationality does not constitute, relative to circularity and harmony, any new ontological category. A circular object is an example of an object that possesses both physical and formal properties (in fact both Plato and Aristotle thought that all physical objects possessed formal properties). Meanwhile “immortality of soul” is neither more nor less than “immortality of form.” Remember that ontologically speaking there is only one form: form is a unity, matter a multiplicity. That both a rational human and a circular piece of chalk are involved in the same dualism of form and matter seems difficult to dispute.

Although Plato never, to my knowledge, uses panpsychist language to the effect that non-living objects such as pieces of chalk have souls (a view more explicit in the double-aspect ontology of Spinoza), neither does he say they don’t. Anyway he could be using the word “soul” to refer specifically to rationality and that wouldn’t affect the basic argument here. Socrates comforts his human friends with the argument that humans are constituted out of both matter and rationality, a formal property, and as form is immortal, so that element of humans will never pass away. But obviously a circular object is constituted out of both matter and circularity, and so anything said about a rational object also follows for a circular object as both are understood as possessing a formal property, and the argument turns on the immortality of form.

The result is that what we have been calling “the problem of rationality” turns out to be an instance of a quite general metaphysical problem, the form/matter problem. Now I can discuss the “resolution” to the problem of rationality that this constitutes, but first there are two discussions that are owed to those who have read up to here. The first discussion is about the relationship between the form-matter distinction and materialism: is materialism unable to give a naturalistic account of the formal properties of the universe, including the mind? The second discussion is about whether or not an eliminativist, externalist solution to the problem of representation (such as the one I proposed in the first half of this chapter) can coexist with a Platonic resolution to the problem of rationality.

Plato is not Kant

Kant’s self-styled “Copernican revolution” was a turning inward, to the study of the mind, for solutions to the perennial problems of philosophy. Kant is, among other things, something of a reactionary. Writing at the end of the century of the Enlightenment he sought to defend Christianity, freedom and morality from the threat posed, as he saw it, by empiricism’s atheistic, amoral worldview. Particularly Kant tried to devise an antidote to Hume, and realized that Hume’s Lilliputian psychology, with its denial that anything like the “mind” could even be said to exist beyond the “impressions” caused by sensory experience, was a weak spot in the empiricist argument. Developing an ambitious account of the way the mind organized the “sensory manifold” with a conceptual framework of its own (including the “concepts” of space, time, cause and effect, multiplicity etc), Kant contained the world as understood by the new natural science within a mental representation: the “phenomenal” world was the world as represented by the rational mind, not to be confused with the actual, “noumenal” world.

Kant’s revolution has practically defined philosophy, certainly popular philosophy, ever since. From the German-language transcendental idealists, psychoanalysts, phenomenologists and critical theorists to the French-language existentialists, structuralists and deconstructionists to the English-language phenomenalists, language philosophers and, yes, cognitive scientists, it is hard to find any major philosophical movement of the last two hundred years that does not reflect the influence of Kant. He is one of the few canonical philosophers, whose influence can be seen in the views of the general public, including a great many people who have never heard of him or who do not appreciate that their own views are substantially Kantian. His message that our own minds broadly condition “how we see things” is congenial to a modern world of great cultural, ethnic and political diversity (notwithstanding the fact that Kant himself thought that the rational mind, qua rational, was the same for all).

Although Kant was engaged in a close struggle with Enlightenment empiricism his revolution was not a turning back of the clock. He presented an alternative not only to the empiricists but to the classical metaphysical tradition as well. The eclipse of explicitly metaphysical philosophy for much of the 20th century is of course due to some extent to the cultural impact of modern science, but it also reflects Kant’s core argument that psychological epistemology is first philosophy. What license have we, stuck as we are inside our heads, to make metaphysical speculations about “the external world”?

As a consequence of this it is now difficult for us to appreciate Plato, that most metaphysical of philosophers. So deeply and widely internalized is Kant’s thesis - that the conceptual order of the world is a projection from the mind onto the world - that many people simply cannot hear Plato anymore. In fact many people, even some philosophy professors and certainly a great many students, simply believe that Plato is Kant: the Platonic universals are Kant’s categories. What else could they be, when it is taken as axiomatic that the mind constructs a representation of the world? A smart student, in a typical but relatively explicit exchange, insisted that there was no such thing as the property of circularity or, for that matter, the set of circular concrete particulars: our minds create such categories out of whole cloth, apparently: and this was the view that he ascribed to Plato (he thought that he knew nothing of Kant). He was not at all impressed when I pointed to the two identical circular ceiling fans. Similarity itself, he understood, was a projection of the mind, a feature of the mental representation. As for the textual evidence (which in reality is clear and systematic), Plato is gnostic, all riddles; no one can really understand him. After all, he can’t mean what he is manifestly saying. Attempts to disabuse people of these notions, when not rejected out of hand, are met with bewilderment, anger, and various stages of grief and disillusionment. The slightly more sophisticated perceive that Plato is a bad, bad influence, putting us all at risk of totalitarian dystopia with his irresponsible foundationalism. One of my students told me that her law professor informed the class that he would have voted for Socrates’ execution.

Ah, well. Forgive this old classroom veteran my hobby-horses. Suffice it to say that, for good or ill, Plato is not Kant. Plato is making assertions about the ontology of the universe (of being); just what Kant and his followers claim cannot be done. Listening to what Plato has to say will help us to develop a resolution of the problem of rationality, at least insofar as this problem is one of the mind-body problems. I am not here trying to determine exactly what Plato the individual man actually believed in its fine points. I am not an historian of philosophy. My interest in Plato is the same as my interest in Hilary Putnam or John Searle or Jerry Fodor or for that matter the person sitting next to me on an airplane: if they have interesting ideas that inspire me in my own thinking I am grateful for the acquaintance. The reader whose principal interest is in contemporary philosophy of mind can rest assured that that is my principal interest as well, and that I am not wandering off into exegesis for its own sake. It’s just that I sincerely believe that Plato is the best exemplar of the best argument for resolving the problem of rationality.

Part one of four of discussion of Phaedo 93a-94e

Part two of four of discussion of Phaedo 93a-94e

Part three of four of discussion of Phaedo 93a-94e

Part four of four of discussion of Phaedo 93a-94e

Agnosticism and Philosophy

This is a response to the really excellent round of comments published at the end of the last blog post. I think the substance of the respective comments is consistent enough not to do a "1),2)" kind of thing (that I often do, finding distinct arguments). But this topic is also fun, I notice, because everyone's got something to say.

Kevin Vond has in the past expressed to me that metaphysics, in any literal sense of that word, might be impossible if our conceptual structure was so 1) arbitrary: could have been radically otherwise within the same natural world, and 2) important in the role it played in our science, our general describing and explaining of the world, for us to ever be in a position to claim that we were actually doing "metaphysics." (And interesting that Kevin tends to be the critic of Wittgenstein vs. my attempts to apply what I take to be Wittgensteinian interpretations).

This is recognizably a descendant of German Idealism, and of course it is the whole drift of the Continental version of language philosophy (Habermas,Foucault, Derrida) of recent decades. It is also the popular view: the story one gets from an intelligent person with a passing interest in philosophy. I am part of a resurgence in metaphysics that has developed among English-speaking philosophers over the past thirty years or so, I think it is to some degree a consequence of the enormous attention that community has given to the philosophy of mind for many years.

I do think that what I like to call "metaphysics" may, for the existentially squeamish, be translated to "semantics." But I for one think that I can think about what sorts of things exist. Probably this all starts in thinking about materialism and the mind/body problem. I studied the metaphysics of universals, say, or propositions, possible worlds, essences and all sorts of things motivated by trying to get a handle on the metaphysics of reductive materialism vs. functionalism etc. N.N. mentions Alvin Plantinga, his debate with David Lewis about possible worlds as a battleground for nominalism vs. Platonism is out towards the deeper waters.

So first I want to talk about Kevin's experiments with concepts in his comment here. Let's think about "America," "justice," "God," and "the external world." If Kevin is right, all of these concepts ought to function in the same way. I like the anthropological behaviorist (a kind of reading of Wittgenstein) criterion that we can be said to be communicating when our communicative act makes a difference, when a person's choices are influenced. This is a definition of "meaning" intended to be eliminativist about Platonic entities, about some nonreducible semantic "property" and so forth.

I think that {"America" and "ethics"} are distinct from {"God" and "the external world"} as subjects of sentences thus: "I believe/don't believe that X exists." By the way I don't need to suggest that agnostics are disengenuous, only that they are confused. I take it that confusion on the present issues is the problem, not wanton disregard of these issues (fully understood!). We might say that "America does not exist" for any number of reasons. We might be talking to an American who was too nationalistic, or we might be talking to a foreigner who was too anti-American. Looks like the same case: we want them to see that they ought not be using the concept to do so much work, because it is leading them into reactionary territory. We want them to use their imaginations a little more and appreciate that the concept "America" is highly complex and has its explanatory and justificatory limits. That is, when we say that they go "too" far, we mean that we no longer accept that their account of things is reasonable. Fair enough. But notice that we cannot possibly mean to make a blanket metaphysical claim such that we claim that every time you mention "America," you are talking about a non-existent entity that in fact has no explanatory or causal role to play in our talk about the world. People just don't talk that much about unreal things. I know that sounds fast, but let me elaborate using the concept "ethics."

What happens in the undergraduate ethics class is, there's always someone who argues that "ethics does not exist." This has to be a metaphysical claim, and it has to be wrong. It has to be a metaphysical claim because it can't be any kind of pragmatic claim: it's a strange description of reality to say that "ethics doesn't exist" if your own metaphysical attitude tends to hold that the only thing there is to "existing" is what people think about and talk about all day. Whatever that is, the epistemological idealist is also, by definition, committed to saying it's real, if "knowing" is only a matter of having a concept that is functioning to influence behavior. Thus, as with "America," I sometimes say "There is no justice" (I admit that I might never say, "There is no ethics," but I could to the same end). For example when I am talking to my students about the importance of education and having a good future. I want them to see that an education is a precious thing that few people receive. I'm giving them some tough talk. But that we live in a world where we are confronted with ethical problems is as nonnegotiable as that we live in one where we are confronted with America.

"God" and "the external world" are not like that. Let's think about "the external world." One can't say, "Well look, we talk about the external world all the time. Not a minute goes by that we don't think and talk about the external world: same as ethics." But this is wrong. We never talk about the external world, if we mean by that something that might not exist given the experiences that we are having right now. Wittgenstein thought that there could be no propositions about ethics (or aesthetics: values in general), if by that a philosopher meant that he was explaining why some things are good and some things are bad. They just are, W. insisted, detecting a limit to language (this is what he and Popper got into a fight about that is described in the book Wittgenstein's Poker, that I haven't read). Note that here we can clearly see the empiricist Wittgenstein: Hume, Mill, the Modernists all share in this non-cognitivist tradition, vs. Continental rationalism.

But he thought it was nonsense to talk about either "the external world" or "phenomenal experience" if one claimed to be talking about anything over and above description of plain experience. (That is a basic reason why I am interested in Wittgenstein: I think he has a good argument for the elimination of phenomenal properties.) If God is (according to you) something in the world, then maybe it is something that exists or does not exist, and that you cannot now know about for one reason or the other. But if God is global the way the external world is global then the concept plays no real role and thus refers to nothing. If we are talking about the kind of thing about which one can neither "know" nor "not know," then agnosticism is impossible to the extent that agnosticism is the claim that "I do not know whether God exists."

However, Wittgenstein also appears to hold that there was "spiritual" reality that was as much a part of the (inexpressible) world as values. He himself took these things to be among the most important in life. That is what gets us finally to the concept "God." It looks like I can use the concept of God to the same rhetorical effect as in the first two examples. I can influence others by saying "There is no God!" I'm trying to shake up a hidebound thinker of one sort or another: a narrow dogmatist, or a paralyzed fatalist, or a self-pitier, or any number of other cases. Of course we also very frequently do this by saying "There is a God!" I'm pretty sure most people (both of us) who have read this far would interpret people, who mentioned God a lot while discussing what to do in daily life, as talking about some ethical character of the world: aiming for good outcomes and to avoid bad ones. But there is another thing, and maybe Plato gets it right.

There is the organized nature of the world. Now let me state out front that I take that in no way to demonstrate the existence of some "designer." In fact to claim to explain design by appeal to a designer just pushes the problem back a step: from whence the designer? It is a perfectly vacuous argument, taken that way. But I see the formal organization of the world as a plain fact like the existence of ethics: the world is like that. This may commit me to some kind of dualism after call: if "The world exists" is not the only existential truth, if "the world that exists is formally organized" is also true and ineffable, then Plato is right: there are two distinct ontological facts: 1)the bare existence of matter/energy, and 2) its formal organization. If that is what is taken as "God" (Plato thought it was "the Good," the source of intelligibility and value in the world), then that is something real that might not have existed, but does.

But that's perfectly acceptable as a pagan fact. I don't need to add God to that. Formal organization is already doing the work. Why is the universe formally organized? Why does it exist? There is no sense of "might/might not be" in either case. Not a subject of "belief" at all. If God is like that, agnosticism is impossible.